SUMMARY

Prose

Part 5
1. Definition of novellete and novel
A short novel is called a novella or novellete, and never becomes a long story.
The novella and novelette is work of in between length, it contains 18,000 to 40,000
words. As the novelette is longer than a short story, it can accommodate further
development characters, and can have more incident, scenes, or episodes, more settings,
and can take place in a longer span of time.
While novel is a long narrative prose deal with over 100,000 words, contain
number of characters – some of them are fully developed, have more incidents, scene, or
episodes, have a number of settings, and may talk place in a long span of time. It may
have more than one theme, may have both minor and major crises (conflicts), and
climaxes.
2. Some criterion of the novel
Stevick proposed several standard ways to ndistinguish a novel from a non-novel
narrative prose. The following all some of the criteria by which the province of the novel
has been establish.
 Perceptual, novelist see and hear what writers of pre-novelist prose do not, or at
least they have found a vehicle by means of which their perceptions can be
presented.
 Structural, another way of distinguish the novel is to propose the novels succeed,
as pre-novelistic narratives do not, actions whose structures support, at every
point, the wish to make a prose narrative as unified as a good play, and a novel is
a novel insofar as it is an action.
 Sociological, it is clear that the novel is a middle-class genre. Extrinsically, it
implies that the novel emerged as a specific genre at least partly as a response to a
new kind of audience, literate, self-conscious in regard to manners and morals,
leisured but commercial, intrinsically, it implies that the novel must come to terms
with the middle class, either by objectifying middle-class wishes and fears, or in
analyzing middle-class life style.
 Mythic, although no novel can satisfactorily contain a hero of romance or epic
proportions, in every novel characters exist at a mhytic level. So we legitimately
cease calling this work a novel and calling it a romance instead.
 Typographic, novel hade made it possible to exploit the apparent authenticity of
print and to bring to the private, silent reader, alone with his book, all the power
of those forms which are experienced aurally and publicy.
 Philosophical, novels represent the minute passage of time, precisely located
space, and carefully observed appereances.
 Subjective, “appeareance and reality” is, in fact, an approach to the essence of the
novel by means of naming its subject. The novel as a genre can be said to have its
own subject.
  Cultural, the novel in the Western culture expresses, critizies, or ministers
culture. It is a picture of society, one may speak of the decline of the organic
community and the growth of individualism, class mobility, and urbanization.
There is something in defining the novel by defining the dominant traits of the
culture in which the culture occurs; yet it is way of looking at the identify of the
novel which can hardly be ignored, since the novel tends to insist upon its own
cultural relevance.
3. Varieties of the novel
A familiar kind of fiction that claims a basis in fact is the historical novel,
detailed reconstruction of life in another time, perhaps in another place. More often,
history is used as a backdrop for an exciting story of love and heroic adventure. Stephen
Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (set in the battlefields of the Civil War) are historical
novels in that their authors live considerably later than the scenes and events that they
depicted – and strove for truth fullness, by imaginative means. In Indonesian literature we
read Surapati by Abdul Muis, Sang Gubernur Jendral by Rachmat Ali, and etc.
Certain other varieties of novel are : the mystery or detective novel, a mystery is
about crime, usually sa murder, and the process of discovering who committed it. The
hero is usually a detective or an amateur doing detective work. The Western Novel,
Western normally take place in the Western U.S. (although swometimes in other
locations), most often during the 19th century. Common elements include cowboys,
ranchers, the difficulties of frontier life, frontier justice, and conflicts between nsatives
and settlers. The science fiction novel, science fiction is fiction that imagines possible
alternatives to reality. It is reality + “what-if.” For example: what if the world ended?
What if there were life on other planets? The imaginary part of science fiction is based on
known scientific facts. For example, if there is time travel in science fiction book, it
would be done with technology, not by waving a magic wand.
Novels are sometimes said to belong to a certain category if they contain some
recognizable kind of structure or theme. Such category is the bildungsroman (German for
a “novel of growth or development”). Example, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796)
by Johann Wolgang von Goethe. This is the kind of novel in which a youth struggles
toward maturity, seeking some consistent world view or philosophy of life.
Another category is a picaresque novel. The name comes from Spanish : picaro,
“rascal” or “rogue”. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn owes something to the tradition;
like early picaresque novels, it is told in aseries of episodes rather than in one all –
unifying plot and is narrated in the first person.
Another variety developed only recently is the nonfiction novel (the name itself
seems contradictory). In which the author presents actual people and events in story form.
Derived not from the author’s memory but from his reporting. Jhon Hersey’s Hiroshima
(1946) reconstructs the live of six survivor of the atom bomb as if they were fictional. In
Indonesian literature Paraktiri T. Simbolon (himself a writer and journalist) writes the
accounts of Kusni Kasdut, ex – freedom – fighter and criminal, in a vivid and touching
novel called Kasdut.